FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT ABA - PAGE 2

There's no shortage of legal information on the Internet. A search on the word "lawyers" using popular search engine Google.com turns up more than 2.6 million Web pages--more than enough for each of the country's approximately 1 million attorneys--including a paid link to Lawyers.com (www.lawyers.com). Now the not-for-profit American Bar Association is weighing in with a consumer-oriented portal (www.abalawinfo.org) that covers topics as wide-ranging as the law's reach into consumers' lives.

The American Bar Association's recent call for a moratorium on the implementation of the death penalty until the rights of the accused can be protected is one of the most blatantly inconsistent positions the organization has taken. Less than four years ago, the same organization that now wants to ensure that those slated for death have received a fair hearing, competent counsel and protection of their constitutional rights took a very different position with respect to other lives also facing termination: The ABA decided to take a pro-choice position protecting the "right" of women to choose abortion.

The American Bar Association has refused to take a position on legalizing doctor-assisted suicides, leaving it to the states to decide whether terminally ill people can get help in ending their lives. Amid arguments that the nation's largest lawyers' group should stay out of the issue, ABA delegates Wednesday defeated a proposal to recommend minimum standards for states that wish to legalize the practice. They approved a resolution stating that assisted suicide "should be left to . . . legislatures and their electorates."

The outgoing president of the American Bar Association said Friday that the $55,000 in cash he reported missing from a hotel safety deposit box earlier this week had been given to him to hold in escrow in "a civil matter arising out of a business dispute." L. Stanley Chauvin Jr. said the matter did not involve his Louisville law firm, but otherwise declined to shed much light on the missing money at a press conference in the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Chauvin said he accepted the cash late Sunday and brought it with him when he caught an early morning flight to Chicago, where the ABA is holding its annual meeting.

Minority representation among lawyers is lower than almost every other profession except dentists and natural scientists, the American Bar Association said Friday. The ABA released a study at its annual meeting that also showed minority entry into the profession has slowed considerably since 1995, with minority enrollment in law schools growing only 0.4 percent since then. This is the smallest five-year increase in 20 years. "We've got a long way to go in the legal profession," said association President William Paul, who has focused on improving diversity in the bar. The ABA report showed that minorities make up fewer than 3 percent of law firm partners in most cities.

It comes as no shock to many that the scales in the legal profession are tipped toward men, so the American Bar Association recently decided to help the profession become "female-friendly" by starting at the beginning--in law school. The ABA's new guidelines to gender fairness, published in a report called "Don't Just Hear It Through The Grapevine: Studying Gender Questions at Your Law School," were sent to all 179 ABA-accredited law schools. Included in the report are self-analyses from several schools such as the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania and Stanford Law School.

The American Bar Association, in a narrow vote Wednesday by its governing House of Delegates, rescinded its controversial policy favoring abortion rights, but policy supporters promised that the issue would not go away. The House of Delegates voted 200-188 in favor of a neutral position on abortion, two days after the group's General Assembly approved a neutral stand by a similarly close margin. Wednesday's vote came six months after the House of Delegates set off the controversy by overwhelmingly adopting a resolution supporting a woman's constitutional right to choose abortion.

Young women ages 15 and under are unlikely to report crimes of statutory rape (sex with men in their 20s and beyond) because they don't see themselves as victims, says a report from the American Bar Association in Washington. Furthermore, service agencies often ignore the problem and juries disregard the impact that statutory rape has on girls, the report states. More than 100 youth service agency representatives, prosecutors and teenage mothers were interviewed about their attitudes regarding sexual relationships between teen girls and older men for the report, which was funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

It's been gone 11 years. Its history is limited to a few press guides with crinkled covers, some newspaper articles browning with age and scattred pictures capturing moments frozen in time. But for those coaches, players, owners and administrators who had careers that flourished, or perished, in the American Basketball Association, it is a part of their pasts they will never forget. "Wherever I`ve coached, the names in the box scores of NBA games I`ve looked for first when I read newspapers are those of former ABA players," said Larry Brown, a former ABA player and coach who now coaches at the University of Kansas.

After a brief debate, the American Bar Association voted Monday to sidetrack a proposal for what would have been its first policy on frozen embryos. A show-of-hands vote of the 531 delegates representing the ABA's 346,000 lawyers indicated a sizable majority opposed adoption of the proposal. "It's a tough issue. I urge you to put . . . (the proposal) in the deep freezer," said lawyer Kenneth Young of Greenville, S.C., after reminding the ABA's policy-making House of Delegates that it also had dodged adoption of a policy on doctor-assisted suicide last year.